Jakarta governor wins Indonesia presidency
Print Edition
JAKARTA Governor Joko Widodo, who captured the hearts of millions of Indonesians with his common man image, won the country’s presidential election with 53 percent of the vote, final results showed yesterday.
Widodo, a former furniture exporter known to most as “Jokowi,” is the first candidate in a direct presidential election in Indonesia with no ties to the former dictator Suharto, who ruled for 30 years before being overthrown in 1998.
The other contender, former general Prabowo Subianto, declared he was withdrawing from the contest shortly before the final numbers were released by the Election Commission, saying there was massive fraud during the election, and that it was unfair and undemocratic.
Widodo had maintained a slim lead of about 4 percentage points in unofficial “quick counts” by polling agencies released after the July 9 election. But Subianto, who has declared assets of US$140 million and was on his third bid for the presidency, repeatedly claimed that polling firms with links to his campaign showed he was ahead.
“We reject the 2014 presidential election, which is illegitimate, and therefore we withdraw from the ongoing process,” he said yesterday.
Observers of the election said they were generally fair and free, with minimal abnormalities. Maswadi Rauf, a political professor at the University of Indonesia, said he saw no sign of significant fraud, as alleged by Subianto.
Subianto’s rejection of the results “reflects the real attitudes of the elite, who are not yet ready to accept losing,” Rauf said. “We are still in a transition to democracy, which is indeed not our culture. And what’s happening indicates we are still immature, we need to learn.”
There were no immediate reports of violence yesterday. About 100 Subianto supporters held a peaceful protest about 300 meters from the Election Commission building in downtown Jakarta, chanting “Prabowo is the real president” and holding banners saying that the commission should stop cheating.
Indonesia, an archipelago of about 17,000 islands, has the world’s fourth-largest population at 240 million and is the most populous Muslim country.
Despite Widodo’s lack of experience in national politics, he built a reputation as being a man of the people and an efficient leader who wants to advance democratic reforms, and was elected to run Jakarta, the capital, in 2012.
Subianto, meanwhile, a general in the Suharto regime and the late dictator’s former son-in-law, came from a wealthy, well-known family.
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